"… an author who writes exceptionally fascinating stories on social and cultural change." — The Globe and Mail

If you want to want to get rich don’t try to do it as a writer, any wise parent would advise their offspring. Unless, perhaps, by writing for corporations or big-time politicians. Winston Church did all three – became a tax-avoiding corporation, was a gifted and highly-paid author, and a brilliant statesman who led Britain and the West through World War II.

What would he think of the pressure on today’s emerging writers to write for free – for news blogs, commercial publishers, and for the general public?

Not much, according to an insifghtful biography of the great statesman. In Mr. Churchill’s Profession: Statesman, Orator, Writer, Peter Clarke examines how the wartime leader conned publishers, beat the tax man, and crafted great literary works while staying just a dodge ahead of his creditors.

Churchill secured his position in history as a statesman, but Clarke makes it clear that “writing was his profession.” His country home of Chartwell became a “word factory” And through most of his life, his earnings from writing made up the bulk of his income.

How did Churchill do this? Born to a distinguished line of nobility, Churchill had friends at every level of high society and all of them – from his American-born other to prime minsters – helped him in his literary career even while they sometimes opposed his political ambitions.

Churchill made a name for himself as a newspaper correspondent at the time of the Spanish-American war and the South Africa, or Boer war. He was clever enough to turn his dispatches for the Daily Post from the Sudan – having earlier served in the 4th Hussars in India – into a best-selling book, The Story of the Malakand Field Force. His participation in a British expedition up the Nile led to a another success, The River War, published in two volumes.

Churchill didn’t have to look far for his earliest inspiration. He achieved early success with a book on his father. Lord Randolph Churchill became his great defence of his father, a key figure in British politics until his early death from syphilis. The book, together with proceeds from My African Journal and a novel, Savrola, earned Churchill over three thousand pounds in 1908-09 – half as much again as his salary as a government MP.

While Peter Clarke is meticulous in detailing Winston Churchill’s hereditary and personal life, it is when he digs into Churchill’s management of his literary income that he is most fascinating.

Throughout his life, Churchill was up against a wall of debt, built primarily from his exorbitant spending on personal pleasures such as wine and whisky. His 1935 accounts show four hundred pounds for wines and spirits supplied to his country home of Chartwell (another extravagance Churchill could hardly afford.)

In 1930, Churchill published an autobiography, My Early Life, and began work on what would be his greatest literary project, his History of the English Speaking Peoples. For the next decade, he stalled and delayed, promising but failing to deliver a completed manuscript of 400,000 words by 1937. He sucked up advances, and cleverly arranged for his publisher, Cassells, to buy the copyright to the work rather pay a royalty. In this way, the income became a capital gain and was free of tax under the laws of that time.

Churchill would not finish his monumental History until the 1950s. World War II got in the way. But the war did give rise to another great literary work, the Second World War.

Together, they stamped Churchill as one of the great figures f English literary, as well as of statesmanship.

Peter Clarke shrewdly observes that “The cash-strapped literary drudge who turned immediately from one big book to the next nevertheless lived in mouth-watering, eye-popping luxury.” And why not? In his own defence, Churchill often quoted Samuel Johnson: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”